I’ll always have time for local business SEO it’s how i got my start giving the small to medium businesses SEO services and tips to improve their strategies.

The landscape in the local SEO field has changed slightly with more focus being placed on diversified reviews, consistent NAP listings, relevant linking to and from and being able to answer search queries of users with relative content that helps to satisfy user search queries.

So let’s take a look at these Local Business factors

1. Reviews – Google has started showing reviews from other third party platforms as well as Google owned properties reviews. There is a desire for a diverse mix of reviews and not just Yelp reviews as an example but more so a good mix of Yelp, Google, facebook and so on reviews. Forbes nails it with this summary of review importance.

2. NAP – NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number. When a NAP listing is completed this counts towards trust building for a brand In the US they refer to this as a citation and in AUS we know it as a business listing both are the same thing. This article outlines the importance of listing your business in directories.

There is a lot of consideration placed on having these listings completed in the exact same way on each listing creating a common profile across all listings, for an accurate identifier if your NAP you can use the one associated with your Google a Webmaster Tools (GWT). Here are some benefits from listing in directories.

3. Relevant linking – it’s reasonable for a locksmith to link to a security company and to an alarm installer but it’s not reasonable for a locksmith to link to a Gym even though that locksmith may have installed that gyms locks, if the gym links back to the locksmith then trust between the two profiles can be impressed easily associated although this link will not be as powerful as if the link from the locksmith was to an alarm installer.

If you think of it like this a search was made on Google for “replace a lock” and locksmithdarwin.com shows up the users visit this site and there is a link out to glassrepairdarwin.com this is natural and relevant and more likely for a user to search for and be interested in.

These are all related search terms and appear natural and not spammy or misleading.

4. Answering Questions – when a user comes to your site if you can answer their search query you are providing helpful insight and therefore providing value.google loves this and rewards sites that answer queries with ranking increases. As long as the site continues to provide value.

One way to do this is by proving a FAQ page or a instructional videos page that can help users find answers your site will become the place they come to for answers also building trust for your brand in the eyes of Google.

Local Business SEO

Local SEO for businesses is carried out in a different method to franchise and national company SEO there are more geo location focused optimisation and keyword application methods used to keep the local business focused on the area most closely related to the target business service area.

The follow up action you can do to further increase your local search efforts is to fine tune your on page SEO, provide content that is rich with answers and helps provide what the user is looking for a smart way to do this without having the ability to read minds is to analyse your data, Google provides analytics dashboards for a reason and if you know how to use this tool you can bypass the need to read minds as the data is presented to you if you know how to find it.

Seeing local businesses grow and use methods we teach is extremely rewarding and something we take great pride in. To grow you business with local search you need to understand your marketplace landscape and this is the method we apply map out the landscape, identify the opportunities and then implement the processes for local search growth, and now its time to see you business grow.